According to Wikipedia, a needle in a haystack is “a figure of speech used to refer to something that is difficult to locate in a much larger space.” Or, put another way, “to search for something that is impossible or extremely difficult to find, especially because the area you have to search is too large”.

If you work in recruitment, either as recruiter or an HR specialist, you know how this feels. It’s what you experience every time you post a new vacancy and in response receive dozens (or perhaps hundreds) of applications. Your job then is to find “the needle in the haystack” – the applicant(s) worthy of the open position, and qualified for round two of your recruitment process.

A good number of organizations find it challenging to handle dozens or even hundreds of speculative application letters. Such occasions lead to wastage of time and even human resources to apparently intolerable levels. This happens even before advertisements get placed for specific positions. In most cases, such applications receive a decline from the respective organization. It is challenging to post an individual reply to all applicants due to constraints of time and other resources.

With Christmas and New Year’s Day almost upon us, this is a great time to review the past 12 months. For eConscribi, 2014 was another exciting year with plenty more ups than downs. Let’s take a look back at some of the highlights!

Blog
In March we started our very own blog, with new posts published approximately every second Monday of each month, and topics covering everything eRecruitment and HR-related, as well as internal eConscribi news. In 2014, our top three most-read blog posts were:

Our last post, “eRecruitment’s Future Looks Bright. Pack Your Sunglasses!”, covered eRecruitment’s future, and the impressions and input we took from Zukunft Personal (which, if you recall, translates to “Human Resources’ future”) in Cologne, Germany, last month. We promised to further discuss some terms we’ll be hearing a lot about in the coming weeks and months: Terms like “online assessments”, “online interview tools” and “social media”, and the role that each plays in eRecruitment. Without further ado, let’s dive in!

eConscribi recently attended the 16th annual Zukunft Personal exhibition in Cologne, Germany. Zukunft Personal is Europe’s largest Human Resources Management exhibition, and this show marked eConscribi’s fourth consecutive appearance. “Zukunft” is German for “future”, and “personal” means, well, “personal”, so “Zukunft Personal” essentially translates to “Human Resources’ future”. The three-day exhibition welcomes a global array of HR decision makers from a variety of organizations, including private companies, government entities and non-profits.

Our booth was busy throughout the show and we had the pleasure of talking with a number of interesting and inspiring HR folks. The only downside to this welcome popularity is that we didn’t have much time to listen to the show’s great speakers; however, while browsing the show’s program, we saw that buzzwords like “qualified employees”, “motivation” and “ROI” (Return on Investment) were common threads in several speakers’ presentations. Moreover, during our many talks with HR professionals of all titles and organizational backgrounds, we continuously heard key terms such as “online assessments”, “interview tools” and “social media”.

A recent study conducted by IDG Connect revealed that 53% of the respondents, which included IT executives working in organizations with 1,000+ employees, are still using outdated on-premise solutions for Human Resources. Thankfully, more than half of those respondents are planning to switch to a cloud-based SaaS solution within the next six months.

Do you know your HRM from your ATS and your TMS? If not, don’t worry. Even people like us, who’ve been around the HR software solutions business for years, get them mixed up sometimes. To eyes both trained and untrained, these three solutions appear to cover the same ground – but in actuality, there’s a world of difference between them. And so for your edification as well as ours, we decided to peel away the gray and set things in black and white once and for all. Without further ado, here are eConscribi’s official definitions of the three most common HR solutions:

Periodically, a story appears in the press about a company experiencing a serious data leak, either due to a technical snafu or a “hack attack”. Whenever we read a story like this, we shake our head and breathe a huge sigh of relief that our company and/or our identities weren’t affected.

In these increasingly “techno-centric” times, this type of thing is happening more frequently. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2012 more than 16 million Americans were victims of identity theft. And in the two years since, there have been several high-profile data breaches (i.e. Sony and Target) that have caused people from Denver to Denmark to pay more attention to how their personal information is gathered, handled and stored.

Now that the “Welcome” blog has been posted and the purpose of this blog is clear, let’s jump right into our first topic: “talent pools”. And let’s start with the most basic question: “What is a talent pool?” A talent pool is a pool consisting of unsolicited applications, and/or applicants whose applications were processed for a prior job opening, but were not hired. You can opt to make your talent pool visible on your company’s homepage, or keep it confidential for internal use only. The first route is recommended if you’re part of an organization that’s growing rapidly and/or frequently hires specialists on a project-by-project basis, whereas the second scenario is advisable for small companies, companies whose business is specialized to the point where the candidate pool is so exclusive that it’s best addressed internally, and the CIA :-). But regardless of which category your firm falls into, talent pools are very important recruiting tools. In fact, companies that don’t have a talent pool in place to cover their future talent needs find themselves exposed to everything from minor disruptions to major disasters when key employees leave.